Company: Cleafy
Co-founders: Matteo Bogana (CEO), Nicolò Pastore (Chief Technology Officer) & Carmine Giangregorio (Product Manager)
Website: https://www.cleafy.com
About Cleafy
Five Lives is a digital health company focused on brain health, cognitive Cleafy started in 2014 on a bet about where fraud was heading. Criminals were moving away from attacking banks directly towards hijacking the customer, on their own device, inside their logged-in banking session. Fraud is visible only while it happens, so detection had to run on live digital activity, not transaction records after the event. Today, more than 183 banks use the Cleafy platform.
The first challenge was creating a category that did not exist. Banks already had transaction monitoring, behavioural biometrics, adaptive authentication and risk engines. Those controls check who is logging in and whether a payment looks unusual. Nothing was watching what happened in between. Fraud and cyber teams also operated separately, so a problem sitting between them had no owner.
A pan-European institution with more than 8 million digital customers ran a live proof of value. Within weeks, Cleafy showed criminals altering what customers saw on screen, controlling devices remotely and changing payment details in flight, none of it flagged by existing controls. False positives fell by 90 percent and fraud losses by 20 percent.
One top 20 European banking group was losing corporate payments to attackers who swapped the destination account so payments landed with them. Cleafy stopped 20 to 30 attacks a day, each targeting between 1 and 10 million euros. One of the largest cooperative banking networks in Italy reported an 80 percent reduction in fraud rates and savings of more than half a million euros per month.
Since 2014, Cleafy has moved fraud prevention forward twice. The second shift came from its own success. As attacks grew more sophisticated, banks generated more alerts than their investigation teams could work through. Adding analysts in proportion to alert volume was not viable. Cleafy built Nyx, an AI system that detects, investigates, correlates and responds to fraud continuously. It reconstructs what an attacker did across customers, devices, sessions and payments, links related activity into campaigns and produces decision-ready recommendations, an operating model Cleafy calls Autonomous Fraud Operations. The work runs autonomously at machine scale; human analysts retain oversight and make consequential fraud decisions.
A Tier 1 European retail bank tested Nyx against fraud cases its senior analysts had already investigated and closed. The bank removed all notes, verdicts and case history before giving the cases to Nyx blind. Nyx matched the senior team on every case, completed investigations in three to four minutes, not hours, and found real fraud in 9 percent of cases the analysts had closed as legitimate. The bank reopened those cases and confirmed the findings. Nyx also wrote a new detection rule that passed governance review and went live.
Cleafy has also built a network effect across financial services. An attack seen at one bank strengthens detection at every other bank on the platform. One private bank went live already defended against attacks it had never met and saw its first threat signal within 24 hours.
Cleafy contributes to CERTFin, the Italian financial cybersecurity CERT within the European FinISAC, and its research is cited by Europol. Protection covers more than 250 million users, with 100 percent customer retention across 10 years.
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